“You’re kidding.”
“I’m not. We happen to have plenty of water and a basin and shampoo, which may not always be the case. And you want to be pretty for your close-up tomorrow. Seriously, take off your shirt.”
She does so and Sonia washes the filth, dried blood, and dust out of the long golden hair, and then uses a comb from another of the many pockets to pull the knots from its shining length. She dries it with her dupatta and then, to Annette’s surprise, cuts off a wide length of the material with the scissors of a Swiss Army knife (drawn from yet another pocket) and ties it around Annette’s hair.
“There!” she says, when she has it right, “you look like a good Muslim wife.” She pauses and cocks her head, thinking. “I don’t suppose you’d consider converting?”
“What, to Islam? Seriously?”
“Yes. It would give them an immense propaganda victory if the bunch of you did, I mean besides me and Amin, who are already believers, and it would almost guarantee your survival.”
Annette considers this proposition for a few moments and then says, “No, I couldn’t in good conscience, and I’m sure Porter would feel the same.” She laughed. “If they kill me I guess I’ll be a martyr to the faith. That will surprise them back in the Friends Meeting in Cannondale, Missouri. I don’t think they’ve had one recently.”
“Well, it was just a thought,” says Sonia. “By the way, speaking of martyrdom, I wanted to tell you how splendidly you behaved back on the trail, backing my play with Dr. Schildkraut.”
“Oh, that! I can barely recall why I did it. It was a sort of spasm of… I don’t know what. Toxic charity, maybe. I just couldn’t bear to see them shoot that nice old man, or stand by while you were being so brave. To be honest, it surprised the heck out of me. I mean, I’m used to what most people would call hardship, with our work and all, but as a matter of fact international peace work’s not really that dangerous. It’s not like we’re actually throwing our bodies between warring armies, although maybe that would work better.”
As she speaks she is taking off her shoes, high-topped sneakers, and her filthy socks. Her bare feet are dirt-stained and bleeding.
She says, “Do you think I could soak my feet in that basin?”
“Sure. That’s what it’s for, more or less.”
Annette does so and groans. After some silent minutes, she says, “This is so-well, strange. I mean, we’re chatting together like we’re in an airport, the words and the intonations… Why aren’t we gibbering or using some other kind of, I don’t know, more elevated language?”
“That’s an interesting question,” Sonia says, and then laughs. “Speaking of conventional phrases. But it turns out that people who are grounded and secure don’t change very much under stress. That’s what being grounded means. The frauds tend to fall apart and the tough guys, too. In the Korean War, they found it was the well-brought-up middle-class kids who resisted the communist torture best, not the ones from the slums, whom you’d have expected to be tougher.”
“Oh, in that case I’m going to be fine,” said Annette, and laughed too. “I assume you were nicely raised too-you’re unbelievably cool about all this.”
“As a matter of fact I had a terribly traumatic childhood. But afterward I sort of reraised myself.”
Annette seems about to ask for an expansion of this statement but checks herself. “So are we completely helpless at this point? Does it all depend on what kind of people are holding us?”
“No, not completely,” Sonia answers. “Do you know what Stockholm Syndrome is?”
“Where the prisoners start sympathizing with the captors. Patty Hearst.”
“Yes. Well, it works the other way around too. We’ll see if we can make that happen. With God’s help, of course.”
After that, they both take to their charpoys and fall into instant exhausted sleep.
Sonia, however, has always been an early riser, and the events of the past days have not changed that. Dawn is just dribbling through the slats of the shutters when she slides out from under the quilt, performs her ablutions, and, searching under her charpoy, finds what she expects, a worn but clean prayer rug. She prays the two raka’ah of the dawn prayer, the Fajr, and then goes to the door, intending to knock on it to summon the guards. But she hears voices in the hallway outside and instead places her ear against a crack in the rough boards. She recognizes one of the voices and listens with interest.
More footsteps outside and the door lock squeals open. A guard enters and looks around. Sonia sees it is the boy, Patang, from the incident on the trail. He backs out and an old woman in black enters. She deposits a tray with naan and tea on it, picks up last night’s tray, and leaves without a word.
Sonia awakens Annette and they eat and drink. They have barely finished when Patang returns with another guard, also masked, this one with a bushy dark beard sprouting out from under his ski mask. Both are armed with Kalashnikovs. Patang says, “Come,” and the two women leave the room.
They are taken to the courtyard of the hujra and made to stand against the wall. In a few minutes, the male captives enter, accompanied by guards. They are all bruised to varying extents and covered with dust. Schildkraut can barely stand and is supported by Porter Cosgrove and Father Shea. When Annette sees her husband, she calls out and tries to go to him, but the guards bar her way with pointed Kalashnikovs.
The captives are now lined up against the wall. Across the courtyard the mujahideen stand in small dark groups, hefting their rifles. It is the classic scene, familiar from the movies, the pathetic last moments of the hostages: up against the wall. Sonia starts to wonder if she has been mistaken, whether for some tactical reason or on orders from a higher level of the insurgency they are all to be executed now. She steps away from the wall and looks down the line of her fellow prisoners, to the left and the right. Next to her, Annette is rigid, her expression a startled one that says, This cannot be happening to me. Manjit stands on the other side and seems to be engaged in some kind of breathing exercise; his brown face is calm. William Craig has lost his glasses and peers out at the morning with the face of a terrified rabbit. Father Shea is moving his lips in obvious prayer. Amin next to him looks like he is waiting for a bus, as if the doings in the courtyard are of no concern to him. Ashton is paper pale but slouches against the wall, hands in his pockets, showing the natives class. Porter Cosgrove, last in the line, seems ready to break down in hysterics, his face contorted like a baby who’s about to bawl. Sonia is ordered back to the wall with shouts and hostile gestures,
Now a man comes out of the hujra carrying a tripod, but instead of a machine gun, the tripod mounts an expensive-looking video camera. Sonia releases a breath she didn’t know she was holding. The man sets his camera up some distance from the wall, peers into the finder, makes adjustments. Then the leader of the band appears, the man in the black turban, masked with a scarf wrapped around his face. He stands in front of the prisoners and reads from a paper. As Sonia expected, it is the usual terrorist want list: removal of infidel troops from Muslim lands, release of prisoners, and then the threat-the infidel spies will be executed if any more Muslims are killed by the crusaders. God is great. Fade to black.
After the video session, the prisoners are allowed to use the latrine behind the hujra and are then returned to where they came from. Patang escorts Annette and Sonia back to their room. Just as they are about to enter the doorway, Sonia stops short and turns to the boy, looking him in the eye. She says, “I can tell you what your dream means: the black horse, and the white, and the cliff.”
The gape of shock on his face as she closes the door on it gives her a good deal of satisfaction.
6
T he next day, I was in the kitchen drinking coffee and watching the news on TV when the doorbell rang. It was a reporter from the Washington Post. For the past couple of days we’d had some press interest, reporters wanting to know how we felt that our wife and mother was in the hands of murderous fanatics
, but we didn’t talk to any of them. I guess this particular woman was more hard up for a human-interest story than the others. I spoke to her in the doorway, long enough to brush her off, but she gave me her card anyway in case I changed my mind and decided to bask in the glow of public sympathy. I was going to toss it away, but then I had a thought.
I needed some time off and the army wasn’t about to give it to me because our unit was due to start our rotation downrange and there was no leave, so when I looked at the reporter’s card and had that thought I got my Washington Military District directory and looked up Major Lepinski. I typed out a friendly note and clipped the reporter’s card to it and called a courier service and had it sent over to his office. The note said I’d just had a visit from a reporter who was doing a story on the blue-on-blue incident we’d both been involved in out in Waziristan, where we weren’t supposed to be in the first place. I said the reporter didn’t know it had gone down across the Pak border but she had a lot of details. She’d heard that a certain Special Forces captain had called down a big bomb on his own side and one guy had been killed and one ruined and one (me) wounded and would I confirm that such was indeed the case and did I know the captain’s name? She’d heard that this officer had not only not been reprimanded for the blunder but had been promoted to major.
I said I hadn’t told her anything; I’d said I’d call her back, because I wanted to talk to you first, sir. And later that day my phone rang and it was Major Lepinski and we had a nice chat. He explained that the whole mission had been secret, national security at stake, and the army had held a full (secret) investigation and cleared him of all wrongdoing; it was just the fog of war; and I said I understood, sir, and I would keep it tight for the good of the service. And now that I was his very favorite trooper in the whole army, I thought I could impose on him for a little favor, because I didn’t want to go along with my unit on this current rotation; I had a few weeks of urgent personal business I needed leave for and could he help me out? And he could, he would take care of it, he would cut orders for a couple of weeks of temporary duty at the Special Operations Command HQ (that is, a no-show assignment); I could rejoin my unit whenever. I thanked him and assured him, Sir, I would definitely shine my reporter the fuck on. I told him I might be going out of the country for a while starting tomorrow, and he said, Go, he’d be happy to cover for me, and I could hear the relief in his voice.
Gloria had called me when the news of the kidnap broke and she was pretty good about it, being a trauma nurse and used to dealing with people on the edges of catastrophe. She asked if I wanted her to come over, and I said no and told her I was going away for an indefinite time. There was a pause on the line. I could tell she was waiting for some kind of good-bye, and I thought about my mother just taking off on me without a word and found I couldn’t do that, even though we’d agreed to no commitments and all.
So I took her out to dinner at Citronelle on my father’s plastic, using his name to get a reservation. Farid is a pretty modest guy, but he’s still a Punjabi mogul, and he’s known at the nice places around town. I’ve never taken a nickel off him but he wanted to do this and I agreed. He assumed I would be going out with a woman who would expect a luxurious dining experience rather than scarfing takeout from local taquerias in bed, as was the case. There are deep veins of misunderstanding in my family, and lately I have started to find them amusing, although it was not always so.
So we had a nice meal, not my favorite kind of food but she seemed to like it, and she spotted some celebrities eating there, and the celebrities looked at us and wondered who we were to be sitting there at one of the good tables in Citronelle. Then I took her back to Kalorama and showed her around the house.
She ooed a little. “I didn’t know you were rich,” she said.
“I’m not rich. My father’s rich.”
“Same difference.”
“No, it’s not. I live on my E-Seven pay.”
“Why? Is he stingy?”
“It’s a long story.”
“Everything’s a long story with you,” she said. “If I knew you had this kind of money I would’ve hit you for some. You could keep me in style.”
We were in my bedroom at this point and she wandered around looking at things, opening closets, checking out the books and CDs.
“Where’s all your stuff?” she asked.
“This is it. I don’t have a lot of stuff.”
“I mean when you were a kid. I’ve got more shit than this in my room at home, and we were piss poor.”
“I didn’t live here very long. Until I was seventeen I lived in various places in South Asia.”
“Yeah? You said you were born in Pakistan but I figured you were raised here. I mean, you’re an American.”
“Am I? How can you tell?”
“He walks like a duck and talks like a duck, he’s a duck.”
“The duck would like a drink,” I said, and went downstairs and came back with a bottle of Glenlivet and two glasses. She was lying on my bed with her shoes off, paging through a high school yearbook. “You’re not in this,” she observed.
“No, I never graduated. I have a fourth-grade education.” She rolled her eyes the way people do when I say that but declined to comment further.
I poured out a couple of drinks. We drank and smooched a little. I said, “Do you really want this story? I mean, I can go on for quite a while about my sad life.”
“I’ll tell you when I get bored,” she said. “No, honestly, you have no idea how uninteresting most people I know are, especially men. They get poured into a mold in high school and they set up and that’s it for life. It’s TV shows, sports, and gossip, what they’re buying and what they’re planning to buy, and bitching about how everything’s not perfect in their lives. And meanwhile they’re working around dying, smashed up people. It drives me nuts. But you… I spotted something about you the minute I saw you getting worked over. I thought you might have something else going on, which is the real reason why I dragged you into this relationship. So spit it out, Buster! You were born in Pakistan. And then what?”
And then what? I can tell the story, but will she understand what it means? Like all Americans, her whole thing is about privacy, pulling away from the parents to be yourself, whatever that happens to be, and I get it that’s the way things are here in the Great Satan; you reach age thirteen and suddenly your parents don’t know shit and you can’t wait to get out of the house and hang with the kids.
But that’s not the way it is where I come from. There, in Lahore, and later in Pashtunistan, boys still want to grow up to be like their fathers, their grandfathers. To be young is nothing. To be young is not to have a job, a wife, to be broke all the time; if you’re a Pashtun, it’s not having a gun. When I was a kid in Lahore, I thought my grandfather, B. B. Laghari, was God on earth, and I thought Gul Muhammed was, besides Baba, the greatest man in creation. And Farid, my father, and my uncles and my aunt thought the same about their father.
When I got to the States and started going to an American high school, which I did for an extremely short time, I thought everyone around me was insane, the way they talked about their parents. I thought the parents were insane too, they way they handled their kids, like every request they made was a bargain they weren’t sure would be kept. That little whiny tone at the end of every statement: “Be home by ten, okay?”
A traditional society. We say the words but we-I mean Americans-don’t get what it stands for. Here’s an example. My grandfather considered himself a modern man, and in a lot of ways he was. He didn’t boot his son out when that son showed up with a strange American woman he wanted to marry. He installed flush toilets-that was a big deal in Lahore at the time-and he gave his daughter the same education he gave his sons. But he wouldn’t allow TV in the house and he was strict about movies. His wife, Noor, was a traditional Panjabi begum, stayed in the home, didn’t mix with his male guests, and so forth. The main point was that he was in control; h
e was living the life he thought a traditional Muslim Punjabi of the higher kind was supposed to lead, but he was like Timothy Leary compared to Gul Muhammed.
Grandfather used to have his high-class ghazal evenings, and after the children got sent away, before they sang the more erotic stuff, we would sneak out of bed and go to the servants’ quarters in the back of the yard, and there we would listen to Dost Yacub tell Pashtun stories for Gul Muhammed and his pals. In the winter they met around a fire pit and in hot weather they moved up to the roof of Gul Muhammed’s house, or under the barsati if it was raining.
Dost Yacub was probably over seventy at the time, and one of the last traditional Pashtun storytellers in Lahore. He’d been a warrior in his time and had probably taken shots at people Kipling had known. He told stories about the wars and feuds he’d been in, too, all about zar, zan, zamin-women, gold, and land-and in my child’s mind the stories of his adventures and the stories about princesses and jinns and man-eaters all blended together to make a picture of a different kind of world than my contemporaries in America were having pumped into them through the tube, none of that Sesame Street-Mister Rogers stuff there around the fire or under the hissing lantern. The fairy tales they tell American kids always end with “And they lived happily ever after,” but most Pashtun tales go out with heads rolling “And thus he had his revenge.” I mean, that’s the point of the stories.
So we would sit there and listen to Dost Yacub, me and Wazir, propping up our eyelids as it got late, and later on we’d play out the stories, the way American kids do with cowboys and Indians. We had tin swords and Pashtun clothes and sometimes we could talk or bribe one of the servants’ kids to play a princess or an evil man-eater. Wazir was four years older than I was, which is a lot when you’re a kid, so he was the master of the games. Technically, Gul Muhammed and Wazir were servants, but they weren’t treated as servants, more like members of the family. The story I heard was that Gul Muhammed had rescued Baba during a riot in Srinagar after the partition of India. He’d been cornered with his wife by a gang of Hindus and they were going to rape her and slaughter them both and Gul happened on the scene with a pistol and drove off the gang and so after that they were like brothers, and Baba brought Gul into his home and Gul became his sworn protector, because when you save a life you are responsible for it ever after.
The Good Son Page 12